The introduction into the workplace of social media tools and other technologies that make communication easier, broader, and faster, tend to underscore a lesson that most managers used to take many years to learn: that we lead not by controlling but by inspiring.

Emergent social software platforms — the enabling technologies of the 2.0 Era — are being deployed by enterprises at a rapid rate. Companies as varied as Microsoft, Spigit, Salesforce, Jive, Socialtext, and IBM now all offer enterprise social offerings for customers. This brings up an important...